Chương 208: 208：Soren's Ascent to Tactical Godhood

Deep into the night at the northern frontier of the Holy Halycon Empire. The freezing winter winds swept out from the absolute depths of the Misty Swamp, violently battering the towering obsidian walls of Boulder Fortress with a bone-chilling howl. This ironclad bulwark, bearing the weight of the Empire's survival in the north, had been stretched to its absolute defensive limits under the suffocating pressure of forty thousand massing Orcs.

Every single heavy cavalryman patrolling the battlements felt the apocalyptic, crushing weight of the impending storm. Deep within the core of the fortress lay the supreme border command center. Behind the heavy, wind-blocking velvet curtains draped over the main doors, Grand Duke Valentine—an undisputed grandmaster tactician and the supreme commander of the northern frontier—stood absolutely motionless, both hands planted firmly on the edge of a sprawling sand table.

Beneath his wild, unkempt mane of white hair, his eyes were heavily bloodshot. Ever since Warchief Blackstone had uncharacteristically drafted a full forty thousand frontline elites from Bloodfang Fortress, posturing aggressively for an all-out siege on Boulder Fortress, Valentine hadn't slept a single wink.

"Forty thousand troops. In a treacherous, muddy swampland like this, their logistical burn rate must be astronomical," Valentine muttered, his brow locked into a deep frown as he stared at the dense clusters of black war flags representing the Orc horde on the sand table. Beside him, the veteran tactician General Marr looked equally haggard. Handing the Grand Duke a cup of hot tea, Marr said, "Your Grace, this completely defies military logic.

"Warchief Blackstone is notoriously cunning and deeply calculating. Even if he intended to ignite a total war, he would absolutely never be so reckless as to bog his main army down in the swamp mud right at the onset of winter."

"Beneath a massive troop mobilization that fundamentally violates all tactical common sense, there must be an unfathomable conspiracy at play!" Valentine, of course, understood this perfectly. To pierce the veil of this conspiracy hidden beneath forty thousand troops, he had paid an agonizing, catastrophic price. Taking a deep breath, he turned his gaze toward the side of the command hall. There sat a sealed side-chamber, heavily inscribed with high-tier isolation runes.

The acrid stench of severely overloaded mana continually seeped from the cracks in the stonework. To establish an ultra-long-distance magical communication link—and to forcefully punch through the jamming arrays deployed by the Blackstone Tribe's Shamans—Valentine had issued the absolute mandate to forcibly activate the command center's highest-tier transmission array. The price? A full half-chest of ultra-high-purity elemental mana crystals from the fortress vaults had been burned to ash in a matter of days.

But infinitely more agonizing was the human toll. The Empire's Supreme Military Tribunal had meticulously planted a high-ranking Orc spy deep within Bloodfang Fortress for fifteen long years. To transmit this priceless, top-secret intelligence, that spy had blown his cover. He had swallowed poison and died on the spot. Creak. The iron doors of the side-chamber were pushed open by two high-tier mages, both drenched in sweat. The Chief Communication Mage leading them stumbled, his footsteps weak.

His robes were heavily scorched by the superheated mana. In his hands, he tightly clutched a parchment scroll emitting a faint, magical blue glow.

"Reporting... Your Grace..." The mage's lips trembled uncontrollably. The moment he spoke, bloody froth bubbled from his mouth.

"The deep-cover operative has fallen. The intelligence has been fully intercepted." Smack! Valentine and General Marr's expressions violently shifted. Stepping forward rapidly, Valentine snatched the top-secret scroll. The microsecond the scroll was unfurled, Grand Duke Valentine—a supreme commander who had weathered countless apocalyptic storms and stared down mountains of corpses without blinking—felt his eyelids twitch violently.

Just the very first line of text was enough to drench his spine in a sheer, uncontrollable cold sweat!

"The Shadow Priest Zagar, accompanied by eight [Sons of Titan] enchanted with Permanent Bloodlust and Rock Shields, is utilizing a shadow array to completely erase all march traces." If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

"Their sole strategic objective: To exploit the forty-thousand-strong feint drawing the command center's defensive focus, infiltrate Boulder Fortress, and execute a decapitation strike against the Empire's Supreme Commander, Valentine!" Valentine snapped his head around, staring toward the sprawling residential sectors and the command hub at the rear of the fortress.

He knew all too well that if a Shadow Priest leading eight terrifyingly destructive [Sons of Titan] utilized ethereal shadow-stealth to slip entirely unnoticed into the inner sanctum of Boulder Fortress... In the event of a sudden night raid, this very command center would be subjected to an instantaneous slaughter. As the primary target, his chances of survival would be absolutely zero!

"What a vicious, venomous feint! Forty thousand troops massing at our borders... merely to provide cover for a nine-man assassination squad!" General Marr's face drained of all color. This was an inescapable death trap! What chilled them even further was that Valentine understood the limitations of the Empire's conventional scouts better than anyone.

The human hunters and outriders deployed on the perimeter of the Misty Swamp could easily detect a massive troop movement, but it was physically impossible for them to pierce the shadow magic cast by a High Priest. Without this single scroll—bought with the life of a high-ranking spy—they would currently be entirely in the dark, waiting helplessly for assassins to quietly sever their heads on a dark, windy night!

"Wait..." After the initial shock subsided, Valentine's razor-sharp intuition immediately caught the anomaly.

"A decapitation strike targeting me—one that Warchief Blackstone went to such extreme lengths to cover up—should have been locked at the absolute highest clearance level.

"This kind of top-secret operation should only be known to a handful of individuals, including the Governor-General himself. Even for our deep-cover operative, with his limited access, how could he possibly have intercepted this?" General Marr drew in a sharp breath of cold air, reading the next lines word for word:"Intercepting this intelligence was only possible because, prior to transmission, the entirety of Bloodfang Fortress was plunged into absolute chaos."

"The high-ranking echelons devolved into a panic, violently shifting blame onto one another. All secrecy protocols were entirely abandoned!"

"The trigger: A detachment of the [Blood Province High-Ranking Inspection Delegation], dispatched specifically to observe this decapitation plan, was entirely annihilated in a gorge!"

"Not only were over a hundred Black Steel Royal Guards riddled with arrows, but the Province Oracle was decapitated."

"Even the supreme Governor-General's biological nephew, Mogg, had his head severed from his shoulders!" Reading this, General Marr's voice caught in his throat. Even his breathing ground to a complete halt. Standing beneath the bright magical chandeliers of the command hall, Grand Duke Valentine ground his molars together and violently snatched the parchment back. It wasn't just the inspection delegation that had been slaughtered to the last man.

The absolute final lines of the intelligence contained the most critical revelation of all:"While resting at the primary outpost, [Bloodhorn Fortress], the Shadow Priest Zagar was ambushed and destroyed."

"Bloodhorn Fortress was conquered. Zagar suffered a point-blank strike imbued with anti-magic properties, resulting in catastrophic trauma to his soul!"

"The [Sons of Titan] were killed in rapid succession. Left with negligible combat power, the remnants routed into the deep swamp, their whereabouts currently unknown!" An apocalyptic disaster that had sent shivers down the spine of the Empire's Supreme Command had been forcibly dismantled in such a dramatically abrupt manner!

Had that inspection delegation—traveling solely to claim the glory of the decapitation—not been wiped out, and had Zagar not been brutally routed mid-operation, the political landscape of the Blood Province would never have spiraled so violently out of control. Without that chaos, their fallen spy would never have intercepted the truth!

"Who..." Grand Duke Valentine's chest heaved violently. He let out a low, disbelieving roar.

"Deep within the absolute heart of the Misty Swamp!"

"Who is capable of annihilating a fully-staffed, heavily guarded inspection delegation?! Who can uproot the heavily fortified Bloodhorn Fortress?! And in a direct, head-on clash..."

"... catastrophically wound a Shadow Priest and butcher a pack of supposedly invincible Sons of Titan?!"

"Just who possesses such godly, sky-shattering power?!" How many heavy legions, grinding through mountains of corpses, would it take to achieve this?! Valentine instantly issued an absolute, ironclad mandate:"Mobilize every single deep-cover operative, scout, and outrider in the perimeter! Cross-reference the data! Investigate this immediately!

"I don't care about the price! I demand to know which of our Empire's hidden elite legions pulled this off!" Less than two hours later. As the morning dawn finally pierced the storm-ravaged sky, illuminating the towering spires of Boulder Fortress, several white-winged messenger pigeons delivered the final, cross-referenced intelligence reports to the command center. When General Marr placed the finalized, irrefutable document onto the sand table, the veteran tactician's hands were trembling violently.

Holding his breath, Grand Duke Valentine looked down at the name. On that parchment, stamped heavily with the [TOP SECRET] seal, lay a single, simple sentence:"Vice-Commander of the Crimson Moon Knights, Lord of Greywater Village, Soren. Leading a detachment of less than a hundred infantrymen at Soul-Sever Gorge and Bloodhorn Fortress, he personally decapitated the Province Oracle and the Governor-General's nephew, and catastrophically wounded the Shadow Priest. Flawless victory."

Dead silence fell over the sprawling military command hall. You could hear a pin drop. For several long minutes, Valentine and Marr merely stared at one another, completely and utterly stripped of words. Soren! The very same man who had thoroughly humbled his arrogant, domineering son, Alaric!

This man—a border commander who hadn't even enjoyed a proper, orthodox logistical supply line for more than a few days—had utilized a heavily constrained, under-equipped detachment to single-handedly execute a monumental, apocalyptic triumph! It was a feat of strategic godhood rarely achieved in the entire history of humanity's war against the Orcs!